Читать книгу American Civil War For Dummies - Keith D. Dickson - Страница 31

Stephen A. Douglas (1813–1861), a Democrat, came to Washington as congressman from Illinois in 1843 and was elected to the Senate in 1847. He became chairman of the Committee on Territories, a position that was highly influential in dealing with the increasingly rancorous debate over the expansion of slavery into the new territories. Douglas gained influence by engineering the portion of the legislation that made up the Compromise of 1850 allowing New Mexico and Utah territories to determine their futures as slave or free states. Seeing an opportunity to solve the slavery question once and for all and unite the Democratic Party under his leadership (which would assure his reelection to the Senate in 1858 and open the door to the presidency in 1860), Douglas enunciated his doctrine of popular sovereignty. The deceptively simple formula of letting the people decide became the basis of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act. In the turmoil that followed in Kansas, Douglas had to defend his policy in his campaign for the Senate against challenger Abraham Lincoln. Douglas, who stood at five feet four inches, was known as the “Little Giant.” He was a formidable orator and astute politician who carefully avoided the traps Lincoln set for him in the debates and won reelection. He would find himself the leader of a fractured Democratic Party in 1860, one presidential candidate among three others, including Lincoln. Garnering only 12 electoral votes in defeat, Douglas fully supported the new Republican president, but died of typhoid fever a month before the bombardment of Fort Sumter.